There are 2 parts to optimizing your site, the code (htaccess and whatnot) and then comes optimizing the hardware server itself, the backend. You need to look into how to optimize SSL performance at the hardware (server) level, which I assume you use apache.

One of the first places you should check for ways to optimize your VPS is Apache. Apache can be one the biggest hogs of server resources if it is not configured correctly, especially on a VPS. There are various settings, such as KeepAlive, MaxClients, StartServers, and MaxRequestsPerChild, that can be tweaked to provide a better performing server.

It looks like your running nginx - which is a good choice. You tested from Dulles, VA - but the site appears to be hosted with digital ocean in India. Those locations will easily have some substantial latency between them. SSL Negotiation often takes more than 1 packet back and fourth - so I can see where those numbers could be coming from. Webpagetest has a test location in Mumbai - I suggest re-running from there and see what the numbers look like.

(11-28-2018 10:38 PM)dreamwerx Wrote: It looks like your running nginx - which is a good choice. You tested from Dulles, VA - but the site appears to be hosted with digital ocean in India. Those locations will easily have some substantial latency between them. SSL Negotiation often takes more than 1 packet back and fourth - so I can see where those numbers could be coming from. Webpagetest has a test location in Mumbai - I suggest re-running from there and see what the numbers look like.

I ran from Mumbai and here are the numbers:
Initial Connection: 50 ms
SSL Negotiation: 277 ms
First Byte is around 520 ms

I tested 2 sites which are quite optimized and using a very close test location and got some better numbers, but you look to be not bad. The first 2 metrics - you can't do too much about are far as configuration to nginx / etc. The TTFB - you can - based on your application setup.